Chapter Thirty

Now

FEBRUARY 13

THIRD TIME’S A CHARM. That’s what they say.

They’re wrong.

Three strikes: you’re out. That was more like it.

You’re out, he kept thinking. You’re out.

Except he wasn’t. Because no one knew and maybe no one ever would—and that’s what was keeping Drew Green awake late that Monday night. Not grading papers or watching reruns of his favorite historical miniseries, but the haunting vision, on repeat in his mind, of Katherine Malloy, so young and so smart and so fiercely determined, snow falling around her in the light of the street lamps, making her appear more angelic than ever, even while she was mouthing, “Three strikes: you’re out.”

He sat up in bed and turned on his reading lamp, shaking off the image, careful not to wake his fiancée, Claire, who had begun the gradual process of moving in with him, for which Green felt both grateful and, maybe predictably, undeserving, not least because of the sorts of alterations she had already made, not just to his home, but to his life, which were simply incalculable, though they included such basics as the constantly replenished stash of toilet paper in the hall and the ability to find all three television remotes at any given time. Even his shirts seemed to hang straighter than they used to in his closet.

He shivered; Claire had rolled over and taken the covers with her.

Three strikes: you’re out.

He shook his head, trying to dispel the persistent phrase. Of course the real Katherine never would have uttered anything so basic as a baseball metaphor, except in the interest of irony, and that was only one of the many things he admired about her, about her poetry anyway, which was, of course, full of youth and blunder and overwrought sentimentality in its own way, as the work of any young writer ought to be, and yet it contained a grace, a fragility, an otherworldliness somehow grounded in reality, “a sort of human sadness essential to the heart of great works of literature,” as he once wrote in a margin comment on one of her drafts.

In a paper about The Scarlet Letter, she’d written of Hester Prynne—and he’d never forget this—“What people don’t seem to understand about good girls is that most of them are not good by choice—they have simply never had the opportunity to be anything other than good. Without even knowing it, they are waiting.”

A deep chill had settled into Drew’s bones. His bedroom, its shelves lined with texts and first editions and stacks of study guides, pamphlets, curriculum notes, syllabi, and the like, appeared smaller and shabbier at night, the wind in the trees outside the three-family house he rented the top floor of louder or at least more blatantly mournful. He was experiencing a bone-level cold that wouldn’t dissipate, he knew . . . even when the weather outside warmed to spring, luring hordes of carefree students and teachers alike out to the arboretum, filling the river that passes through with fresh fishing lines and peopling its parks and pathways with bikers and picnickers, each in their own bubble of apparent immaculacy.

But would the woods in Devil’s Lake really, in Green’s thesis, if he were to write one on the subject, represent that early pastoral view of incorruptibility, of natural phenomena blessed by an ancient or perhaps even Edenic innocence, or instead the more puritanical connotations of a post-Hawthorne narrative in which its inherent wildness suggests a release of one’s own inner passions and consequently, one’s potential to wander down a bad path, to get lost, to do wrong?

Yet—had Drew Green done wrong, really?

He got out of bed and stood facing the window, thinking not just of Kit Malloy’s eyes, but of other faces that had come before hers. All of them too young, too new, too . . .

At last a kind of heat shuddered through him, but was it the warmth of desire or guilt?

He’d hoped settling down with Claire would . . . what? Absolve him of all that—both the desire and the guilt.

He fingered the pale curtain that draped the edge of the window, like a diaphanous skirt, one forbidden in the school handbook. Even as a kid, he’d always been drawn to what was forbidden.

Had Drew Green done anything wrong? That was one answer he knew.

Yes, yes, of course he had.